I love to go to church in cathedrals.
On our recent trip to Europe, my wife and I attended services in the cathedrals of three different cities–Salzburg, Vienna, and Prague. Worshiping in these cathedrals was one of the highlights of a wonderful trip.
Holidays are a great opportunity to visit other churches. If approached with an attitude of humility, it is very good for Christians to worship with believers of different traditions because it helps to broaden our understanding about ourselves, the Church and the God we worship.
All three of these services were very different from the very large Evangelical church I attend every other Sunday of the year, and the experience provided some significant impressions.
Normal Christian Worship
One of the most fundamental lessons that one can take away from a very different worship experience is a challenge to the idea of what is “normal” in worship. The essential purpose of all Church services whether in a gym or cathedral is the worship of God–as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It’s very easy to fall into the idea that the way my church/denomination does this is “normal,” and everyone else is weird.
Honest encounters with difference can help dispel these harmful notions.
A Protestant at a Sunday Mass
Before a Protestant participates in a Roman Catholic Mass, it is important to appropriately frame the historical relationship between these two branches of the Body of Christ. It is not productive to adopt the simplistic narrative that says the Roman church was corrupt and encumbered by extra-Biblical doctrines and rituals of which the church needed purging.
Rebellion against corruption and some theological imbalances were a part of the early Reformation, but it quickly became something else.
One of the most significant, and positive changes of the Reformation was a rediscovery of Grace. But this wasn’t the only change.
The Reformation shifted authority from the Church and tradition to the individual. This is not a shift toward a more biblical Christianity.
Before 1517, the Bible was read in Latin and interpreted by the church through the filter of a long tradition. The Reformation resulted in Bibles written in the vernacular so people could read and interpret it for themselves. Individuals could also access God more directly without the mediation of a priest. These changes were perhaps necessary in that they recognized that faith has both an individual as well as a collective component.
But with reforms such as these, the Reformation also ushered in a significantly different way of thinking, about the self and its relationship to authority. These changes prompted other changes which have affected Western civilization ever since.
It’s why we have so many denominations in the church. Liberal democracy couldn’t be conceived without it. Moral relativism is its logical end–most of the most contentious issues in our culture today are a result of the individual asserting its autonomy.
The Idolatry of Individualism
The Reformation may have initially asserted individuality, but this grew into the individualism which dominates our culture today. We understand the self as autonomous, there is no greater authority. “My rights, my choice” is the modern mantra.
There’s no doubt that the church needed some reform in the 16th century because it was filled with the idolatries of the day. But we fool ourselves if we think we are not equally susceptible to the idolatries of the world. One of the main idolatries in our culture is Individualism and worship of this idol has permeated the western church.
One of the ways this is seen is with the emphasis in Christian circles on “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” Although this is an important dimension of the Christian life, the Bible has much more to say about how we are to live in community than it says about a personal relationship with Jesus.
This imbalance can often be seen in the language we use around baptism of adults and even the professions of faith of those baptized as infants. We can also see it in the songs we sing that are full of the pronouns “me” and “I.” We see it in our interpretation of the principle of being “salt and light” in the world to be an individual, rather than a collective mandate (for example when we choose and education for our children).
We have the same problem that every church of every age and every place has–we are blind to our idolatries. By humbly engaging meaningfully with Roman Catholics (or Protestants from non-Western societies) we can more easily see our own idolatries.
Worshiping in a cathedral always gives me a glimpse of a time when Christians weren’t so immersed in the worship of the self.
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